TV
Jasper Rees
The political thriller may be alive and well but in recent years it has been spending time abroad. Elements of government conspiracy are intense flavourings of, for example, The Killing and Homeland, while back in Blighty there has been little to trouble the scorers since Paul Abbott’s State of Play nearly a decade ago. Why? British drama has been too busy scoffing at Blair and Brown, Cameron and Clegg to worry itself with shady Whitehall cover-ups. So it’s not exactly a surprise that the crafty and pulsating Secret State harks back to the distant yesteryear of A Very British Coup.Chris Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Over the past couple of years, since my husband’s first book was accepted for publication, I have had the dubious privilege of becoming intimately acquainted with the behind the scenes day-to-day workings of the crime novelist. For that reason Miranda Harvey, the long-suffering wife of Ian Rankin, is now something of a hero of mine. As she tells Imagine’s Alan Yentob, she is now so used to her husband’s writing patterns she can predict the “pause” that will hit, around page 65, when the UK’s most successful crime writer has run out of notes and has no idea what to do next.As a documentary, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
No Dickens novel seems to come around the block more often than The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, possibly excepting Great Expectations, which is taking a bow on both big screen and small for the bicentenary year. Relatively recent assaults on the teeming 800-page doorstopper include adaptations by ITV, on the big screen, Radio 4 and Chichester Festival Theatre. That would surely count as enough Nicklebys already. But into this bustling crowd the BBC has thrust its own new version. Will it fight for its place in the world like the novel’s impetuous young hero, or be trampled Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Julian Fellowes has often seemed to treat Downton Abbey as a speed-writing contest, with momentous events and the tide of history whirling past like roof tiles in a typhoon. Happily, as series three has developed, the pace has evened out a bit, though Shirley MacLaine's Mrs Levinson barely lasted as long as the disfigured pretender to the Downton inheritance in series two, while the storyline in which Downton was financially ruined and then promptly saved by Matthew's convenient inheritance was straight from the Peter Pan book of screenwriting.It remains addictively watchable, and this season Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This factually-based saga of two feuding families in the woods and mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia might not look too prepossessing on paper, but two episodes in, Hatfields & McCoys is starting to grip like a knotted rope. The combination of powerful acting from all levels of the copious cast and the authentic-feeling depiction of primitive backwoods life in the bleak aftermath of the American Civil War isn't pretty, but it's morbidly compelling.If you're in a sceptical frame of mind, it is possible to categorise the series, as one American critic has, as "a bunch of bibulous Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I think Frankenstein should always be pronounced Fronkenshteen, the way Gene Wilder says it in Young Frankenstein. But that would have been far too frivolous for this intermittently interesting but often irritating film about the legacy of Mary Shelley's feverish teenage novel.The fact that the film's objectives seemed ambiguous didn't help, and its graveyard slot didn't bode well. It looked as if it must have started off as a behind-the-scenes account of how Danny Boyle created his wildly acclaimed stage production of Frankenstein at the National Theatre last year, since extracts from this Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
With Horror Europa, Mark Gatiss provided further confirmation that he’s now one the most astute, likeable and measured figures contributing to our current cultural landscape. His approach is entirely personal, but never derailed by unfettered enthusiasm or formless digression. A cross-border journey through continental European horror film, Horror Europa was a treat and leagues beyond the celebration of schlock its near-Halloween scheduling and hackneyed title sequence initially suggested.Gatiss rounded up some subjects that didn’t surprise too much: the Italian director Dario Argento, French Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The appearance of the Goldfinger-era Aston Martin DB5 in the new Skyfall is prompting cheers from audiences, and as Richard Hammond commented in this celebration of Bondmobiles down the ages, the Bond movies have been unique in their ability to turn cars into personalities. From the absurd to the spectacular, 007's transport has rarely been less than memorable, apart from a disastrously lacklustre flirtation with BMWs during the Pierce Brosnan era.Hammond's jokey, blokey, anecdotal approach, mixed with some notable specimens of jerry-built science, made this a hugely diverting hour. He Read more ...
howard.male
Perhaps only someone as supremely confident of his world view as Richard Dawkins might think he could come up with a TV series that would live up to such an all-embracing title. But at least in this three-part series the evolutionary biologist gets off his militant atheist’s high horse to tackle the God question from a more constructive angle. Instead of continuing with his usual line - God doesn’t exist so get used to it - he offered ideas as to how we can best prosper in a godless world.These programmes were essentially built around two stultifyingly naive and unimaginative questions that Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Is Misfits now a misfit on E4? When it first announced itself three years ago, the series about probationers with sci-fi superpowers straddled the bridge between the WTF generation and the can-do ethos of the comic strip. It was quite a lot of fun, even for those outside the target demographic. As is natural with any series targeted at a youth audience, success breeds the one thing that no cult series wants: staff turnover.When the departure of Robert Sheehan could no longer be avoided, a special online edition lasting all of eight minutes was broadcast to explain his forchcoming absence. The Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Chas & Dave’s run of hits up the mid Eighties made them an alternative to the gloss of Wham!, Duran Duran and Culture Club. They had three chart albums in 1983. But was there more to their “rockney” music than a first take suggests? Were they more than a cockney slanted, pie ‘n’ mash Wurzels? This programme, prompted by their 2009 retirement, made a valiant – heroic – attempt to elevate them to the level of the greats. Peter Doherty declared them “just like The Clash, The Smiths, Keats”. Obviously, he was thinking of “Snooker Loopy”.They are pretty great. But by not taking their good-time Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We got to the beach around the 10-minute mark. Or “semi-naked suburbia”, as Michael Palin called it. And started patrolling the sands for rounded Brazilian rumps (female). Apparently only adolescent boys do this sort of thing, and television cameramen. A local scholar explained the terms deployed to describe the various body types. The melon, the guitar, the ... you don’t want to know. Palin certainly didn’t look as if he did.You sort of know where you are with Brazil. It’s one of those countries you can feel you’ve visited without ever having actually got round to going. Indeed, until he was Read more ...